There are tons of ways to plan, log, and assess your extreme athletic training, but leave it to Fathom to design one of the cleanest, clearest ones we've ever seen. The all-star data-visualization firm, headed by Ben Fry, teamed up with GE to create triTRACK in advance of London's Dextro Energy Triathlon.

The Gates Foundation has produced an online tool that every parent should see: The Education Nation Scorecard for Schools, which shows the performance of each and every school in the United States, and allows you to compare them across districts and states.

The charts were created by Fathom (the firm led by data-viz genius Ben Fry). They're draw from data filed each year by the various states's departments of education.

"Let's face it, many hospitals are pretty terrible places," says architect Tim Powers, the senior vice president for the health care studio of Astorino, a design and architecture firm based in Pittsburgh. With more than a billion dollars of health care build in their portfolio, Powers is in a position to issue his grim diagnosis. "Hospitals are traditionally bad buildings. They look bad, they function poorly. They smell bad.